A land acknowledgment is far from sufficient in honoring the intentional, institutional harms inflicted upon and still adversely impacting Native peoples and the historically marginalized since the colonial project of the United States began. Because I, as an ethnic European woman, have immense privileges in this empire — privileges that have historically come at the expense and exploitation of the global majority, I believe it’s my responsibility to be vocal in my recognition of my privilege and active in my work towards a more just future for all people — one that includes and champions Indigenous and Native folks, people of color, and those with disabilities.

As a care provider in the birth space, it’s also crucial to acknowledge the reproductive injustices that plague our healthcare system and society at large. Loud and clear, our current birth system disproportionately harms women and people of color. Black mothers are more than twice as likely to die during childbirth than White mothers — their babies face similar mortality rates.

Modern obstetrics, though life-saving for countless women and babies, has a sinister and racist history. The physicians who developed the field of obstetrics based their understandings and practices on the traditional knowledge of birth workers and midwives, usually elder women of color, but barred them from inclusion in their practices and offered them no compensation. By the mid-19th century, midwives faced systematic erasure and stigmatization, which stripped pregnant women and mothers of various communities of their traditional, culturally significant care systems.

In addition to this theft of knowledge, many gynecological practices commonly administered today were first tested on the bodies of enslaved Black women, who received no compensation for their pain and sacrifices. Regardless of the positive impacts that these procedures may have brought for some women over the past century, it is important to understand that the foundations of modern gynecology are based on the bodies and the pain of enslaved Black women. I honor these women, the true “mothers of modern gynecology.” Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy were among them — read their stories here.

Violations of Black women’s bodies in the context of reproductive health continued past slavery. In the face of the Eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, 100,000 mostly Black, Latina, and Indigenous women were forcibly sterilized under US government programs over decades. These sterilizations were performed on incarcerated and disabled folks as recently as the twenty-first century. Read the Relf sisters’ story here.

These few examples paint only a sliver of the picture of the reproductive harms perpetrated against marginalized women in this country. Women’s bodies, especially those of Black and Native women, continue to be policed and denied reproductive freedoms. Our society consistently disenfranchises Black mothers, mothers of color, and their families and communities through institutional and structural racism, including food apartheid, unequal access to education and healthcare, economic insecurity, and the incarceration of men of color.